案例库 · 产品与设计 · 产品决策 · 1981–1982
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
Sony's 3.5-inch disk won with a hard plastic shell that made the delicate media durable.
Sony put the magnetic media in a rigid case with a metal shutter, and the industry adopted Sony's 3.5-inch design as the standard.
Sony
那一手
The first floppy disks were 8-inch and then 5.25-inch: a thin mylar disc in a flexible cardboard sleeve that was easy to bend and could pick up dust and fingerprints, so drives jammed and media failed.
Sony remade the package. Its 3.5-inch diskette put the magnetic media inside a rigid plastic shell with a sliding metal shutter that protected the surface from shocks, scratches and bending, and it fit far more data in a smaller cartridge that could go in a pocket.
The standard caught on when the Microfloppy Industry Committee picked a 3.5-inch specification based on Sony's design in 1982, and when IBM put the drive in its PS/2. That shipped the format into virtually every PC, and the 1.44MB disk became the universal icon for 'save'.
为什么管用
- A hard shell and sliding shutter solved the fragility and contamination that made flexible disks fail.
- The smaller cartridge held 1.44MB and was pocketable, a clear step up in both capacity and convenience.
- A standards committee adopting Sony's design removed the format war and gave vendors one spec to build.
- IBM's PS/2 and then every other PC maker standardized on it, so software and media all converged on the format.
可以搬走什么
If your product loses on a physical weakness, fix that weak point and make the new, small, tough version the thing a standards committee agrees on - the rest of the industry then follows.
后来呢
The 3.5-inch diskette became the standard removable medium for personal computers and the universal 'save' icon. It was slowly displaced by CD-R, USB flash drives and cloud storage; Sony stopped making 3.5-inch floppy disks in 2011, but the drive icon survives in nearly every operating system.
资料来源
- History (1976): Minicomputers Stimulate Floppy Disc Sales
- Floppy disks, faxes, envelopes and other analog fossils that survive in Windows imagery
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